Let's talk about manga and anime that is marketed towards girls and women

fanservice

I was talking with a friend recently who was watching "More Than A Married Couple, But Less Than Lovers". She was surprised at the amount of fanservice in a show that seemed otherwise directed towards girls. I haven't seen that show, but it reminded me of Chobits, which I read earlier this year. Thta series is definitively for girls, but has a lot of female nudity as well.

We sort of came to the conclusion that fanservice can, in some circumstances, be a fantasy for women as well as men. The fantasy of being desirable. I think CLAMP often draws on this fantasy. I find their protagonists tend to be competent and cute, often without meaning to; they go about their days being stunningly gorgeous and impressive without ever knowing. A kind fo One Direction type fantasy of being alluring to somebody while going about your everyday life.

Some more on CLAMP:

A while ago I read "The Pervert" by Remy Boydell and Michelle Perez, which is a graphic novel about being a trans sex worker. At the end of the story there are a few pages that mimic the ads and illustrations that come at the end of a volume of manga. One of the drawings mimics a piece from Chobits, the CLAMP manga about a robot girl. I was halfway through Chobits when I read the Pervert, and that illustration really changed my perspective on the manga. The series is really wack in a lot of ways (teacher-student, pseudo-incest, more pseudo-incest, etc) and all that kind of distracted me from the core of the story. Amidst all of it, it's about the struggle of going through life, trying to find yourself and find love, in a world that doesn't see you as a full human.

Magical girls

I recently watched Princess Tutu, which was great. I've read that it was created by someone who worked on the Sailor Moon anime, as was Revolutionary Girl Utena. There's a tumblr post that I'll find and put in here one day that basically says that Princess Tutu and Revolutionary Girl Utena are alternate perspectives on the relationship bw Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask. That really inormed my viewing of Princess Tutu, tbh.

It's fascinating to me how the two stories are so different in tone and style and yet honestly so similar in content. Using the surreal fantasy landscape as a way of exploring the roles given to us subliminally by society. The meta that acknowledge the story is a story, which allows the viewers to, on one level suspend their disbelief and see the characters as real people, while on another, see how they are only puppets in a grander play that is beyond their control. By making this so clear through the mechanism of story, we can extrapolate this onto our own lives, and perhaps see our own puppet strings the way these characters do.

Who is the prince? Who is the princess? What do those roles mean? The two shows are obviously preoccupied with gender, although RGU takes a darker and more critical look at the relatinoships bw men and women than PTT. Anthy, the archetypal woman, and Akio, the archetypal man, are siblings, lovers, enemies. Akio controls every single aspect of the world they exist in, especially Anthy's personal life. Anthy can only retaliate through extremely subtle means, and her communication is constantly obscured through the lens of the other person's desires. She is the most hated person in the world. She is trapped in the coffin, which throughout the series symbolizes a psychological restraint, and she is being tortured by the hatred of all of humanity. She can escape only under her own power; although Utena, the androgynous figure in the story, helps her escape, Anthy must ultimately complete her escape alone.

In Ibsen's "A Doll's House", Nora leaves her selfish husband to find herself. At the end of the play, she walks out the door and into the unknown. In Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", a utopian society is reliant upon the eternal suffering of a single child. When people reach adulthood, they are shown the child and are able to make the decision to continue to participate in society or to leave. Most stay, but a few. . . walk away from Omelas. Given the title.

Lu Xun's "What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?" questions the point of "A Doll's House". When Nora walks out of the house, where does she go? What does she do? How is she to earn money, to make a life for herself? Might it have been better for her to live in ignorance? The fundamental injustices of the home are only replicated outside those four walls.

So what happens after Anthy leaves Akio? What does it actually mean to escape the coffin? In the real world, Anthy would have no respite from the hatred of the world.

Princess Tutu has our heroine actually leave behind her human body to live her life as a duck. Anthy abandons the situation and continue to live her life as a woman in the outer world, while Ahiru not only leaves the situation but fully and physically leaves behind the body that was the girl and the princess. I'm trans, so I like that ending.

I like to think that Madoka Magica is drawing from some of the same themes and concepts that PTT and RGU ustilize, although to different ends. PMMM, imo, uses the time loop in a similar way as RGU and PTT use the story. The characters are similarly locked into their destinies and have to escape the malicious workings of an external actor who controls their lives.

PMMM focuses more cloesly on selfishness, altruism and the ego, while RGU and PTT dwell more on the social pressures that influence us as individuals, but there is, imo, a lot of overlap between them. Sayaka's insistence on her identity as a hero even as it kills her and Madoka's fading from reality at the end of the show both remind me of Utena.

PMMM has less to say about gender than the other two series, but it is still present in the text. Kyubei at one point states that young girls are chosen specifically because of their emotional capacity. I'm skeptical of that assumption that girls are inherently more emotional than boys, but I think it could also be read as being about society's reliance on women's emotional skills to function.